


Rien

by AlexMartin (RandomDraconic)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:55:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29076705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RandomDraconic/pseuds/AlexMartin
Summary: Alone, well and truly alone for the first time in years, in a decade, Ryou cried, and no one stopped him.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	Rien

In the middle of the desert, in the shadow of the remains of a mudbrick hovel, Ryou cried.

He’d told Yugi and the others that he’d needed a moment, that everything in the last day had been too much and he just needed a break from the sun. “I’ll catch up,” he’d reassured them, pretending he didn’t see the knowing glint in Yugi’s eye. He was glad that Yugi hadn’t tried to stop him, and had instead ushered everyone away. They wouldn’t go too far, but it was away, and it was enough.

Alone, well and truly alone for the first time in years, in a  _ decade _ , Ryou cried, and no one stopped him.

The silence, the nothingness inside where a monster had made its home for years, it hurt more than he’d thought possible. He half expected, mostly hoped, that any moment now, it would come back. Snorting and threatening to give him something to  _ really _ cry about. It wouldn’t happen though, that much was obvious, even without the Millennium Ring in his possession. He couldn’t feel it there anymore, pressing against his consciousness, waiting for an opportunity to wrest control of his body back. He wasn’t sure he missed it, he  _ shouldn’t _ miss it, but he wanted to feel that again, hear that faint cold laugh in the back of his head. Anything that would mean that he wasn’t alone again, alone now.

Yugi would understand, he had to. After all, hadn’t he cried when the Pharaoh had lost their duel and walked into the afterlife at long last? He would know the feeling, the sudden silence and the deep, empty pit where once had been a … 

A what? The Pharaoh and Yugi had been friends, comrades in arms, allies in a great battle against a great and terrible evil. And whoever--  _ what _ ever had inhabited the Ring had been that terrible evil, a parasite that had used Ryou’s body whenever and wherever it chose. They hadn’t been allies, much less friends, or even shared a common goal, the way Marik had had with it at one point. No, Yugi might understand the sudden silence or the feeling of missing a part of himself, but not in the same way. The Pharaoh had been a wanted companion who shared a single body and goal with him. Things hadn’t been the same between Ryou and it.

“Bakura?”Yugi’s head peeked around what had once been a doorway as if on cue. The smile on his face faltered as he took in the tears streaked down Ryou’s face. “I… Are you okay?” Ryou nodded, and Yugi sighed in relief. “It must be a lot, huh? Being free from…” He gestured vaguely. “All that. Marik and Ishizu and Rishid, they’re having a hard time, too.”

He didn’t understand, Ryou realized at that moment. He thought that he was crying from having a burden lifted suddenly, a weight thrown from his chest without a moment’s notice. And that, he supposed, was partly true but it wasn’t quite right, and it certainly wasn’t the  _ same _ . There was no equating what had happened, what he was feeling, with the end of a generations-long task and captivity. What was decades of misery, darkness, and suffering to a paltry six or so years? Sure, Ryou had been through a lot since his father had found the Ring, but it wasn’t anything close to what the Ishtar family had dealt with.

But Yugi wouldn’t get that. He didn’t  _ want  _ to get that, not out of malice or disinterest, but...  _ He’s grieving too. _

Ryou wiped the snot from his nose on the black coat he’d woken up wearing earlier and had just kept with him since then. “Yeah,” he lied. It was easy if he did it to reassure Yugi and the others. It came easy now after all the lies he’d told at its urging. He stood up, brushing dirt and sand off his jeans. “It’s… it’s been a lot.”

“I know.” Yugi smiled ruefully. “It feels… weird. It’s quiet, huh?”

“Yeah.”  _ It’s weird not hearing it laugh.  _ “We’ll get used to it though, won’t we?”

That might have been the best lie Ryou ever told anyone, including himself, though he’d hoped it would be true.

Six weeks came and went and he couldn’t just  _ get used _ to it. The other day, while organizing his closet, he’d stumbled on the old setpieces he’d used to play Monster World what seemed like an eternity ago, including the cone-roofed tower that had pierced his hand back then. It had been cleaned thoroughly after that, before he’d stashed the entire tabletop setup in careful boxes as if that could prevent a recurrence in the future. But it still felt dirty to him, wronged in a way that couldn’t be scrubbed off the resin. 

At first he had set that box aside in the farthest corner of the room, as far away from him as Ryou could manage. But as the Saturday afternoon slowly ticked by, morbid curiosity overtook him, and he found himself pressing the point of that same tower against the scar it had once left in his palm. It didn’t hurt as much now, but he wasn’t sure how much it had hurt then. He had been able to control only that left arm at the time, and the pain had been a sharp flash before nothingness overtook whatever else there might have been.

The scars were only visible as slightly darker bits of skin, marking where the tower had pierced through his hand and left him with a mockery of stigmata. It had healed from a gaping wound to a scab within hours back then, no doubt because of its presence. The same was true of the wound he’d gotten during the Battle City tournament, though he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten that. It had been bad enough then to require medical care, but that was more due to the sheer volume of blood he’d lost and the pain he’d been in. It hadn’t healed up quite as well as his hand, but it faded to an ugly scar faster than the nurses had estimated, and only bothered him if it was hit particularly hard.

There was a slight, if somewhat dull twinge in his palm and Ryou glanced down to see that the sharp tip of the tower had pierced his skin. For a brief moment, panic welled up in him as he remembered what it would do when he’d accidentally hurt himself before, even just a grazed knuckle from a potato peeler. 

But the punishment, the threats, the lecture, the disdainful laughter, none of it came. None of it would ever come, not anymore. And the realization turned the fear into sadness, before that became bitterness and a not-insignificant amount of shame that he shoved away. Ryou wiped the blood on his jeans before quickly packing up the rest of the box and putting it back where it had been before.

He left the tower out on a bookshelf, the blood dried on its tip. He’d deal with it later.

Another month passed and various other household detritus had come to join the resin tower on his shelf. The fragments of the ten-sided dice destroyed in the same Monster World bout, the deck of Duel Monsters cards that Ryou had found tucked in one of the inner pockets of the black coat he’d woken up wearing in Egypt, among other things. It was enough now that the shelf looked more like an impromptu shrine to games than an idle storage space.

_ A shrine to It. _ The thought gave Ryou serious pause as he glanced over at it from his desk, where he’d been trudging through homework. Glad as he was for the distraction school had offered since then, it was temporary at best, and he kept catching his thoughts drifting towards It despite his best efforts. Everything reminded Ryou of It, from the way his classmates still seemed to tread lightly around him to the occasional blank spot in his memory when he was asked to recall some information or event that could only have happened when it had had control over his body. 

Yugi, for the most part, seemed to be doing better than he had in Egypt. Neither of them had talked about what they’d lost --  _ and why  _ would _ he ask, when you finally got your freedom back?  _ \-- but he’d made a point of making sure, however subtly, that Ryou was included in everything he and the rest of the group did. And he didn’t comment on how quiet or distracted Ryou seemed every time. 

He had moved on, talking about future plans and working at his grandfather’s game store, llaughing at whatever stupid idea Jounouchi was trying to convince Honda to help him with. Yugi didn’t spend every other breath thinking about the Pharaoh, and if he did, you certainly couldn’t tell.

Ryou pushed his notebook away with a sigh. Now his thoughts had  _ truly _ gotten away from him and it wasn’t worth trying to pretend he could just settle back into conjugating sentences in English. Instead he grabbed the scrap of yellowed paper he’d unearthed earlier that afternoon when his pencil had rolled behind his desk, and made his way over to the shelf with every intent of setting it there with the rest of the odds and ends. 

It was a note he’d gotten years ago. The note that had come in the same package as the Millennium Ring, scrawled in his father’s spidery handwriting, telling him how he’d come across such an odd artifact and asking Ryou to look after it for him until he came home from his next trip. _ ‘Who knows, maybe if you wear it to school, you’ll make some new friends!’ _

Ryou snorted on re-reading that sentence for the first time since he’d opened the package. It was hard to miss the irony in those words, though he would never tell his dad that yes, It  _ had _ made him friends. Friends that had wound up with their souls in tiny lead figures or dice, while he’d gotten so lucky and had hosted a parasitic entity bent on carrying out a three thousand year-old vendetta--

He shut that line of thought down quickly, ignoring the goosebumps breaking out across his arms. Instead, he made a deliberate point of turning his attention to the crowded mess of objects strewn across the shelf. If he was going to pile things here, well, his supplementary adventure books deserved a better place than behind a pile of junk.

Ryou flipped on a cooking program on the TV and listened intently to every tiny step of the risotto recipe as he spent the next hour reorganizing his bookshelves to better house his Monster World manuals and guides. The tower, note, and other pieces were tidied up quickly on the resulting empty shelf, but Ryou didn’t give it any more thought than the on-screen chef seemed to give the onions she was dicing. If the deck looked centered in the arrangement, he hadn’t done it on purpose.

It was another three days before the shelf caught his attention again. He’d flipped on a fan to help cool off after a particularly warm walk home from school and the resulting ‘breeze’ had hit the card deck just right, sending the cards flying across the room. It hadn’t taken long for him to pick them back up, but the last card he’d grabbed gave him pause. 

He didn’t remember ever purchasing a Diabound Kernel, hell, he hadn’t even heard of this monster before now, but it was a familiar image all the same. It bore a striking resemblance to the Zorc figure he’d once used in Monster World, before It had challenged Yugi.

Ryou frowned at the card. It hadn’t really been him using Zorc though, had it? He couldn’t even remember  _ seeing _ Zorc in any of his bestiaries or modules, but It couldn’t have just invented a boss enemy… 

He brushed those thoughts away. No one had mentioned fighting It in Egypt, but they must have, beyond the Pharaoh besting It in the end, or how else had It vanished? Ryou hadn’t seen this card after the Battle City tournament, and  _ he _ certainly didn’t have much interest in Duel Monsters, not after It had put him through that particular mess. No, It must have picked this card up somewhere during the time It had completely overwhelmed Ryou and controlled his body. Maybe It could spin up a character in Monster World, but It definitely couldn’t create a Duel Monsters card from nothing, and It had made sure that the creator of the card game couldn’t make a new card under threat, either--

Ryou decided that he didn’t like the Diabound Kernel card. Wherever it had come from, wherever It had come by it, didn’t matter. Everything about the card made him feel nauseous, from the drawing of the monster to the memories it evoked. It didn’t belong here, in his house, in his  _ life _ . Especially now that It was no longer part of it. It didn’t deserve to exist, not here or now or ever again.

_ But it does exist. It  _ did  _ exist.  _

Ryou set the card up against the tower on the shelf, leaning it back on top of the rest of the deck for all to see. He went to bed early after that and tried to not think about the serpent-bodied card watching him from across the apartment.

Five days the card stayed upright, Ryou having successfully fought the impulse every time he passed the shelf to destroy it, to rip it to tiny shreds, to remove It from his life for good. It was paper. Yugi and the rest may have believed in the heart of the cards, but there was no heart in the copy of Diabound that stared back at him. It hadn’t had one, after all, so why should his cards?

The apartment was well overdue for a thorough cleaning. Yes, he’d clean out all the cobwebs and dust hiding in the apartment, and throw out all the old junk that insisted on haunting him, including the cards.  _ Especially _ the cards. It wasn’t as if he’d seen them as anything more than tools, so it was fitting that they be destroyed along with the Ring.

The problem with deciding to clean an apartment that only housed one person was that Ryou didn’t have much  _ to _ clean normally, which meant he had to come up with tasks to occupy himself. The kitchen was easy: mop the floor, clean the countertops and cabinets, take out the trash. When he opened a door to put a stray can of soup away, he found himself spending time organizing his entire pantry and spice cupboards, throwing out anything that he didn’t remember buying or particularly liking in case It had somehow tainted his food. After the kitchen came the living room and his bedroom, which weren’t much more work. Vacuuming, dusting, sorting through the two or three days’ of mail that he’d let build up, nothing particularly taxing or time-consuming, unfortunately.

The bathroom was perhaps the greatest challenge, though. The biggest downside of long hair was cleaning the shower drain out, a task that Ryou usually dreaded, but he now found himself relishing. He had no drain cleaner, nothing that would dissolve the disgusting, gunk-and-thread mass that had wound its way through the drain. It took ages to pull all of it, or as much of it as he could get with the little barbed bit of plastic he kept around and his fingers, out of the drain, coated with grey sludge. But even with as long as it had been since he’d last cleaned the drain out, it was surprisingly free of hair. Ryou couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken drain cleaner to the shower. Had he…?

No. No, It wouldn’t have done any of that. The only ‘maintenance’ It had been capable of doing was self-serving, the bare minimum that kept Ryou and, most importantly, Ryou’s body functioning. And even that was suspect. To think It had done something as dull or helpful as clean the shower out was out of the question. 

Ryou wiped the hair and slime from his hands as if it was toxic. His skin felt disgusting, dry and peeling where the hair residue had been, and that feeling stretched across his arms and shoulders. And all the while his brain kept spinning around the question he refused to entertain any further.

He took a long shower, scrubbing until his skin felt raw and the patter of hot water against skin and tile drowned everything else out.

He had nightmares that night.

Ryou had nightmares most nights to be honest, if he dreamt at all. It wasn’t even odd that It was there, given how It still loomed over Ryou’s life, nearly three months later. 

But tonight It had a face.  _ His  _ face. Staring back at him with such intensity that Ryou’s stomach immediately tied itself in knots.

He woke with a start and barely made it to the bathroom to vomit. The face stayed fixed in his mind. And it refused to fade away, unlike every other hellish vision he'd seen in his dreams. Even as Ryou forced himself to focus on brushing his teeth to rid his mouth of the lingering taste of bile, the face remained. He half expected to see those red eyes staring back at him in the mirror when he glanced up after rinsing and was relieved to see just his normal brown eyes.

The thought of going back to bed made his stomach churn, so Ryou turned every light in the apartment on and bundled himself up on the sofa in the living room.

He had never actually _ seen _ It before. It didn’t take much of a stretch to imagine, there was only so much It could do with Ryou’s body and face, but even still, it was just off from his own familiar face to send his heart racing. The uncanny valley, in ghastly form.

And that face kept returning to his dreams, the same expression night after night, silently demanding something and sending Ryou back to the brightly-lit comfort of the living room each time, often with a stop at the bathroom first. If he was lucky he would be able to fall asleep again, though the lights kept it from being as restful as he would’ve hoped. The sixth night was the worst, every attempt to sleep brought him face-to-face with him again in an unending cycle. After the fourth try, he’d given up and only barely made it through the school day thanks to the school vending machine’s stock of canned coffee.

“Is everything okay?” Yugi asked during lunch, using the banter between Jounouchi and Honda to avoid drawing attention to Ryou. 

“Fine,” Ryou lied. “Just… didn’t sleep well last night, that’s all.”

Yugi frowned. “Or the last four days. I’m not blind, Bakura,” he added as Ryou fought to not choke on the mouthful of coffee he’d just swallowed.

_ But you won’t get it. _ That thought gave Ryou pause.  _ Would _ Yugi get it? Did that even matter? He certainly didn’t look like he was going to abandon his line of questioning, that much Ryou could tell. “Later,” he told Yugi, seeing that Anzu had stepped in to break up the brewing wrestling match between Honda and Jounouchi. “I promise.”

Yugi held him to that promise. He feigned needing to pick something up from a hobby store near Ryou’s apartment after school and pulled Ryou along with him by the jacket, practically dragging him. Height, evidently, meant nothing to sheer determination.

“It’s been a while since you’ve had me over,” Yugi noted cheerfully once they were out of earshot. Dread welled up in Ryou’s stomach at the sudden clarification of Yugi’s plans.

“I… I didn’t realize you wanted to come over so badly. A-after last time, I mean.” His mouth was dry and he gulped in an attempt to find some moisture. 

Yugi smiled at him disarmingly. “Of course I do, Bakura. We’re friends, after all.”

_ After all that, _ Ryou corrected mentally as the dread grew. How they had remained friends after he had tried so many times to kill Yugi or the Pharaoh was anyone’s guess. And for the first time Ryou regretted staying friends with him, now that it was all over. He fumbled his keys when they finally reached his apartment, hands trembling before he got the door open and pointedly ignored the way Yugi’s brow had furrowed. 

“It’s been a while,” he said. It wasn’t a lie, it had been ages since he’d had any actual company. “I, ah, I think I’ve got snacks over here…” And with all the composure of a mouse cornered by a patient housecat, he began rummaging through his pantry cupboards in search of the bag of chips he’d impulse bought during his last trip to the grocery store. “They’re just salt and vinegar, but if you’d like something else, I can--”

“You’re deflecting, Bakura.” Yugi set his backpack and shoes in the doorway and glanced around the living room, settling on the blanket and pillows left in disarray on the couch. “Is something wrong with your bedroom?”

Ryou kicked himself mentally. “Nothing wrong,” he lied. He had sworn he’d put those back on his bed when he’d failed to fall back the last time and had instead stayed up all night watching TV. “Just had a hard time falling asleep last night, you know--”

“No, I  _ don’t _ know.” Yugi crossed his arms over his chest with a frown. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, other than that you’re lying, and as your friend, I’d like to know what’s going on.”

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” Ryou insisted, which only got him a sigh and an eye roll before Yugi, arms still crossed, made his way out of the living room and into the game room without another word.

And then: “Bakura. What’s this?”

The dread in Ryou’s stomach could have swallowed him up at this point. He scrambled into the room to find Yugi staring dumbfounded at the shelf of cards and debris. “I can explain--”

“Please-” Yugi didn’t move his eyes from the Diabound Kernel card at the front of it all. “Please tell me something.” Every word was staccato, as if he was forcing them out of his mouth.

“It was in my pocket,” Ryou started. He would’ve killed for a glass of water right now. “I just left it there, and it--”

“And it, what? Became a  _ shrine _ ?” Yugi’s fists clenched at his sides. “After all that, after everything it did to us, to  _ you _ , you created this?”

“I didn’t mean to--”

“Of course not.” Yugi snorted, incredulous. Something about his tone made Ryou’s hands shake. He balled them into fists, letting his nails bite into his palms.“No, you just  _ happened _ to build this. It tried to destroy the world and you decided to just honor it on a whim.” Yugi’s eyes flicked back to him suddenly, and Ryou couldn’t tell if it was despair or rage he saw in their violet depths. “Like a  _ friend. _ ”

“It--” 

Yugi ignored him. “Is it even gone, Bakura, or did you lie about that, too?”

There was a sickening  _ smack _ that resonated through the apartment and Ryou found himself staring at Yugi sprawled out on the floor. His left hand throbbed from the impact.

_ Oh god.  _ He’d  _ hit… he’d  _ hit… Ryou didn’t have time to complete that thought as his legs were swept out from under him and he fell to the floor completely prone.

Bakura Ryou had never been in a fight in his life. He had spent his entire life avoiding fights whenever possible. In the rare occasions where he hadn’t been able to avoid them, well, he’d had the Millennium Ring, and fights were a lot easier when you weren’t throwing the punches yourself. But he wasn’t here to take over or puppeteer his limbs in the right ways to hit Yugi or push him away now. Ryou found himself operating purely on instinct as they rolled around the floor of the room, grappling and attempting to inflict more harm on the other than they received. It felt like it lasted an eternity but it only took a well-placed knee to the gut to cement Ryou’s win over his friend.

“I didn’t ask for any of this!” Ryou managed, throat tight. He was distantly aware that he was crying, and that there was a possible bleeding cut on his face. Maybe two. “I didn’t  _ ask _ you to come over, I didn’t ask for  _ him  _ to be in my life, but here we are! And even if it’s wrong, I  _ miss _ him, goddammit.” 

He sat back on the floor, giving Yugi enough room to recover from that last kick. “Goddammit, Yugi, don’t you feel how  _ empty _ it is?” The hole in his chest felt a hundred miles wide now, though the ache was more likely caused by a well-placed punch than anything internal.

There was a dark bruise already blossoming on Yugi’s jaw and he touched it gingerly. “You can’t bring it back,” he told Ryou, voice quiet. “It… The emptiness, it’ll heal--”

“ _ When _ ?” Ryou demanded, hot tears spilling down over his cheeks. “You said it would before, when did it stop for you?”

“It hasn’t!” Yugi shouted back. “I just know it has to!” Was he crying, too? “Shit, Ryou, you have to move  _ on _ from it! You can’t keep dwelling on it forever!” He got to his feet, pulled his clothes back into some semblance of acceptability while he studied his classmate’s still-seated form. Ryou met his eyes for just a second before looking away. There was a coldness there that he remembered too well… from the Pharaoh, though, not from Yugi.

“I hope you find peace, Bakura. Or… something.” With a nod, the shorter boy took his leave and it was a long while after the front door closed before Ryou felt like moving again.

The face visited him again that night, though it was different. He seemed… sad, though whether for himself or -- _ no, he never thought of you, not like that _ . Ryou’s stomach churned, and It flinched, then smiled.

“Landlord.”

Ryou jolted awake drenched in sweat. His hands were still shaking when he brushed to get rid of the harsh taste of bile in what had become his nightly ritual. He made a mental note to wipe up the spilled toothpaste when he had more control over himself again. A glance at the clock told him he’d managed nearly an hour and a half of sleep this time. And from the dampness of his bedding he would need fresh sheets before he made another attempt at it, and a shower as well, for good measure. He managed to force the questions out of his mind as he shoved bedding in the washing machine and struggled to get the fitted sheet on his mattress properly, but showers were made for unwanted thoughts to come slithering in.

It had talked.  _ He _ had talked, even if it had been one word. The word he had always dreaded hearing the most, but it was still his voice. It had the same cadence and sound that he’d used since the first time they had spoken over a year ago, but something felt off about it. His tone felt strange, almost wrong from how Ryou remembered it. 

_ Relieved. _ That was it. He’d been  _ glad  _ to see him there. And, in a sickening way, there was a not-insignificant part of Ryou that had been almost glad to see him too, and especially to hear his voice again. Not, of course, that it made him any less nauseous to so much as entertain the idea that he was still here. That he hadn’t actually left entirely. That he was still somewhere out there, lurking in the shadows,  _ waiting _ .

When Ryou managed to find sleep again, there were no faces waiting for him.

Ryou chose to skip school the next morning. For one, he didn’t want to face Yugi after their fight yesterday. He had enough bruises and scrapes from it that it would be impossible for the others to not put two and two together. 

For another, he’d had an idea. A stupid, idiot idea, but he wanted-- no, he  _ needed _ answers. And he needed them six weeks ago. He wasn’t going to wait another day and have worse nightmares when a potential solution was right in front of him.

It was a little ironic, he supposed, that the room where they’d once played Monster World would be where he’d attempt this. Chalk and candles came out of the box in the closet as did a half dozen books on various rituals. None of them were specifically focused around ancient Egypt, but Ryou would just have to make do with what he had on hand. From there, he operated mostly by his gut feeling: a pair of concentric circles for the perimeter, with a mish-mash of symbols and glyphs copied carefully in the border between them. Technically that was all he needed, but he found himself finishing it with a triangle in the center, each point touching the inner circle, a fitting echo of how they’d first connected. 

At each point he put an object: the die fragments and resin tower at one base point, the scrap paper note he’d been sent with the Ring at the other base point. The Duel Monsters deck went to the top point, Diabound Kernel face-up, though Ryou made a point to look at it as little as possible. Then he shrugged on the black coat he’d woken up wearing in the ruins of Kul Elna, lit candles, and sat down at the triangle’s base to wait.

And wait.

And  _ wait _ .

It was nearly sunset when something happened. The room, already dark with the lights out, became nearly pitchblack as the electricity in the rest of the apartment shut off with a loud  _ click!,  _ leaving the low-burning candles as the only points of light, flickering enough that they might go out at any second.

To Ryou’s great relief, they stayed lit.

And to his greater dismay: “Landlord.”

At the top of the triangle, where the deck of cards were...  _ Him _ . The Spirit of the Millennium Ring. Ryou forced the bile back down his throat, attempting to keep his voice level. “Spirit.”

He glanced around the room despite the shadows that obscured all but the chalk circle. “You’ve put away the games, I see.” A sigh. “Shame. We could’ve played.”

There was a tremble in Ryou’s hand that he fought to still. “Why are you here?” 

The Spirit raised his eyebrows. “You  _ invited _ me, Landlord. It would be rude to ignore--”

“You know what I mean.” 

“I’m not sure I do, actually.” The Spirit folded his hands together, index fingers held against his chin. The flickering candlelight made his face look sharper, a reflection with harsher angles. “You  _ invited _ me, Landlord. Why?”

“I…” Ryou swallowed hard, until his mouth felt moist enough to try speaking again. “You’re dead.” The Spirit blinked, long and slow, but didn’t move otherwise, watching his former host intently. Ryou took that as an invitation to continue. “You’re dead, and you lost. The Ring’s gone.”

“Very observant, Landlord.” There it was, that mocking tone that had come part-and-parcel with the Spirit back then. It was almost a comfort in Ryou’s ears. “I lost. The world’s still here, and  _ you brought me back _ .” He leaned forward, voice suddenly ice-cold. “ _ Why. _ ”

Goosebumps ran up Ryou’s arms beneath the thick polyester of the coat. “You’re dead--” He started and the Spirit’s eyes flashed.

“You. Brought. Me.  _ Back. _ ” He practically snarled the last word. “I’m dead, and I want to know why I’m  _ here _ . You owe me that much.”

“I  _ owe _ you?” Ryou snapped. “After what you put me through, now  _ I’m _ in debt to  _ you _ ?”

“So you’re not a broken record.” The Spirit leaned back, all traces of anger gone now that he’d gotten a rise out of him. “I want answers, Landlord. Why did you bring me back?”

“Because I want answers!” He fought the urge to smack his hand against the floor, lest he disturb the chalk somehow. He didn’t know what would come next should that happen. 

“You can get those from your friends.” 

Ryou clenched his hands into tight fists. “I need them from  _ you _ ,” he admitted through gritted teeth, nails cutting half-circles into his palms. “Please.”

Twin eyebrows shot up on the other’s face. ““Please,” is it?” The Spirit snorted. ““ _ Please _ .” Hmph.” He mulled it over for a moment, brow furrowed, and sighed. “A trade, then. Host first, then.” He gestured with one faint hand in Ryou’s direction. 

The double-meaning was not lost on Ryou, though he shoved it away. “ _ Are _ you dead?” It seemed a silly question, but…

“Yes.” The Spirit rolled his eyes. “You already knew that, but yes. I am dead, wholly incapable of coming back, beyond…” He waved a hand at the chalk circle. “Didn’t they tell you how it happened?” There was a faint note of hope, or something close to it, in his words.

“We don’t talk about it.” There was no point in lying. He had a feeling the Spirit would know, anyway, and it wasn’t as if Ryou was a particularly good liar to begin with. Before he could open his mouth again, Ryou held up a hand. “That was a question. My turn, now.”

“You’ve learned.” The Spirit pursed his lips. “Clever.”

Ryou ignored the barb. “If you’re dead, why come back?”

He could have sworn he saw the Spirit suck in a breath, though his relaxed pose didn’t move an inch. A moment passed, stretched into what felt like minutes, then: 

“It’s very lonely, nothingness.”

There was no sarcasm in his words, no hidden barbs or snide asides.  _ He’s being sincere _ . “You understand better than most, Landlord,” the Spirit continued. “You miss me, don’t you?”

Now it was Ryou’s turn to be caught off-guard. “I…”

“Don’t lie,” the Spirit warned.

Ryou swallowed, forcing his breakfast back down. “It’s very lonely,” he admitted finally, voice a frail thread as though doing so had seared his throat. “There’s just nothing there.”

The Spirit visibly relaxed, invisible tension gone at those words. “Just nothing,” he agreed with a slow nod.

“Is that why you keep showing up?” The hoarse whisper could only have belonged to him, though Ryou didn’t feel his lips move to form the words. When the Spirit frowned, something tightened in Ryou’s chest. “Every night, for the last week, at least,” he continued, leaning forward. “Sometimes several times.”

The Spirit looked uncomfortable. If Ryou hadn’t known him better, he might have mistaken it for concern. 

“Landlord, I can’t just  _ appear _ as I please. Not unless you have the Millennium Ring, which…” He rolled his eyes, obviously annoyed. Ryou remembered how it had felt, seeing it fall away into the earth and his chest ached at the memory. “The only way I have out of the nothing is if you  _ want _ me here. Like this.”

The ache threatened to consume Ryou’s entire body now. “I… I didn’t want you back,” he managed to croak. “I don’t want you back.”

The Spirit got to his feet, arms crossed. “You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met, Bakura Ryou,” he said, not unkindly. His outline wavered like one of the surrounding candles. “I thought it part of my torment, seeing my host, again and again. Hearing your voice.” He snorted. “And here you were pulling me back.”

“I don’t--”

“ _ You do. _ ” Icy fingers grabbed Ryou’s chin in an instant, the Spirit bent down so they were at eye level again. “You said so yourself, Landlord. It’s lonely. There’s nothing there. You’ve brought me back every night to  _ feel _ something, anything.” His other hand grabbed Ryou’s and pushed both together against his chest. When Ryou caught his eyes, the Spirit didn’t look angry or mocking.

He looked sad. So much sadder than he had in any of those nightmares. 

“I can’t come back, Landlord,” he told him. “You can’t keep bringing me back. It’s not right.” A twitch in the corner of his mouth. “I lost. I lost everything, and that includes  _ you _ .” A cold thumb brushed hot tears from Ryou’s cheek. When had he started crying? 

“I didn’t--” Ryou hiccupped. “I didn’t  _ ask _ for this.”

“No.” 

“I didn’t  _ ask _ for you to play puppetmaster and take control whenever it suited you for six years!”

“You didn’t,” the Spirit’s thumb continued stroking his cheek, unmoved by Ryou’s sobbed accusations. 

“I didn’t  _ ask _ for you to try killing me or my friends a hundred times!”

“Only four or five,” the Spirit corrected gently.

Ryou ignored him. “I did  _ everything _ right! I should be  _ glad _ you lost and died and can’t come back!”

The hand entwined against his chest flickered, gone and back in a staccato beat. Panicking, Ryou glanced around the circle and saw the candles were burnt away to nearly nothing. The Spirit pulled his face back to look at him, one finger against his lips in a request for quiet. 

“Don’t let the nothingness claim you, too, Landlord,” the Spirit of the Millennium Ring, the being who had once been his other, unwanted, parasitic self, warned gently. And then, with uncharacteristic gentleness, he kissed him, and was gone as the last candle snuffed itself out.

It was a long while before Ryou’s limbs would move, and even longer before he trusted that he could do so without risking injury. The chalk was smudged in places, symbols illegible now that they’d served their purpose. The candles were barely puddles of wax in their containers. There was a distant hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen breaking the silence. All of it felt dangerously distant, even as he picked up the candles and set them on the kitchen counter to cool before he threw them in the trash. The sun had long since set, though the circle could hardly have been up for an hour, and Ryou absently reheated leftover soup to fill the pit in his stomach that, he knew, couldn’t be filled with just food.

His muscles ached. His head felt too tight for his brain. It would be an early night.

When Ryou laid down, stomach warm but empty despite the hot food he’d mindlessly shoveled into it, sleep proved elusive again. It was different though. His mouth burned still, and the Spirit’s final words echoed in his head, an endless litany.

_ Don’t let the nothingness claim you, too. _

He let himself cry. He wept into his pillow, remembering how gentle the Spirit had been this time. His mind raced:  _ Had he always been like this? What if he had? What if he had shown this before, would he be gone now?  _ If Ryou had tried harder, would things have ended like this? Could he have changed him or stopped this? His thoughts threatened to swallow him in endless ‘what ifs’.

_ Don’t let the nothingness claim you, too, Landlord. _

The hole in his chest, his heart, his mind, it felt larger now, a great canyon that Ryou could almost picture in his mind’s eye. It hadn’t felt so big before, even that first day in Egypt when the loss had become real and tangible to him. Now it seemed to take up half of him, and he could feel it growing with every thought he had of the Spirit. Of the empty void that lay where he’d once taken up residence.

_ The nothingness.  _

Ryou took a deep, snuffling breath.  _ He’s gone. _ He couldn’t bring the Spirit back, not for more than what felt like minutes at a time. The pitying way he’d looked at Ryou earlier, had that pity been for him? For himself?  _ For us both? _

It didn’t matter, either way. He was gone, and Ryou was still here, dangerously close to being consumed by the nothingness that was waiting and growing within. 

_ Don’t let the nothingness claim you. _

He slept the whole night. A deep, dreamless sleep that held no monsters, no faces, just darkness. When Ryou awoke hours later, he made a call on the phone. Made plans for later that morning, at a cafe that was a short enough walk from his apartment that he felt he could manage it, disconnected as he felt from his body.

When he walked in the door with a faint jingle hours later, he waved at Yugi, and his friend waved back, albeit with more enthusiasm, from a table that already held two large mugs of black coffee. 

The fear and the nothingness swelled up from inside him. Ryou pushed it back down, slid into his seat at the table, and together they mourned what they’d given up in exchange for that nothingness, with the only other person in the whole world who could share in it.

It would take a long time before it would shrink back down to anything Ryou felt he could manage, before he could put the cards and resin shards away in a box in his closet for safekeeping. But he could manage,  _ would _ manage.

The nothingness wouldn’t claim him, too.


End file.
